I'm a big fan of plain-text tools. Source Code. ReStructuredText. LaTeX.

I'm not a big fan of proprietary file formats and document formats that are difficult or impossible to decode. JSON and XML rock. .XLS files are painful and difficult to work with.

UML Diagrams are a particularly odious problem …

http://www.meetup.com/757-Python-Users-Group/

I'm looking forward to meeting other Python developers in Hampton Roads.

Tonight. 7:00 PM. See you there.

A single poorly-made decision can have profound ripple-effects. Once your stuck with it, you make accommodations, hacks and work-arounds. Eventually, things work, but the result is less than ideal.

Changing tack requires sometimes pervasive rework to the application. How can we reduce the risks and improve the value created?

First, the definition. A use case describes an actor's interaction with a system to create business value. There are three parts: Actor, Interaction and Business Value.

1. Not Interactive.

1.1. The use case is just features and technical attributes with no actor interaction expressed.

1.2. The use case is …

Objects are everywhere.

Weirdly, some people can't see them. I guess they live in a rarified, HP Lovecraftian world of pure action inhabited by amorphous things that can't be properly called "beings" but rather "doings" because they're pure activity with no existence.

Read "Hypnos". "They were sensations, yet within them …

After reverse engineering procedural code in C, VB or even Python, I'm finding that procedural programming inevitably leads to bad, bad code-rot.

Consider some of the common design patterns.

Strategy. Confronted with alternative strategy choices, a purely procedural code solution is either

• If-statements everywhere the strategy is involved.
• Block comments …

Too much of programming is intimately tied up with the tools to support the development of the software.

Example 1. I was told -- with absolute and fierce conviction -- that VB may suck as a language, but Visual Studio more than makes up for the obvious problems. For some people, Tools …

See http://www.meetup.com/stackoverflow/Hampton-VA/ for information on next week's Stack Exchange meetup.

For other events near you, see the Meetup page.

I'll be wearing my "official" Stack Overflow shirt. I'll try to grab a seat by the door, also, to be easy to find.

#SOMeetup

A joyous milestone today. Removed much of our pre-Piston RESTful web services code.

We started with the Django-REST Interface. While nice, it imposed a number of restrictions that were onerous. In particular, we have a lot of non-model responses. They're model-like data that we serialize to be compatible with …

This is a fair-to-partly silly question that shows up on places like StackOverflow once in a while.

Python is used widely and pretty heavily.

It's a built-in feature to many operating systems in common use. The exception, of course, is Windows.

I just found out -- the hard way -- that Python …